[Given the recent uproar over the depiction of Batman and Batgirl in the latest animated DC movie adaptation of The Killing Joke, I thought this piece was worth republishing. A version of this column originally appeared on PopMatters two years ago – hence the dated references. Remember when we only suspected but didn’t yet know that Batman v Superman: Drawn and Quartered was a sloppy, nihilistic hate screed? Ah, the innocence of ignorance.]

The question of who, ultimately, is the ‘best’ superhero has haunted the minds of nerds for generations.

…Well, at least two generations. Three maybe? Four?

It’s why we squee in delight watching Joss Whedon’s The Avengers, seeing our heroes smack each other around a little ­before they all team up and order bowling league uniforms. It’s why Superman and the Flash keep racing each other around the world just for funsies. It’s why there are still some people inexplicably excited about Zack Snyder’s upcoming cinematic atrocity, Superman v Batman: Drab and Senseless, because at the very least it promises the sight of Supes and the Bat slugging it out – or, more accurately, the opportunity to see Snyder slavishly recreate Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns comic panels without troubling to use any imagination or storytelling craft for himself.

(Speaking of Batman v Superman, if I can just take a brief tangent for a moment: no doubt others have already made this observation, but ‘v’ is actually used to indicate a legal battle, not a physical one. So unless Bruce Wayne is fronting the money for a class-action reckless endangerment suit against Superman for all that carnage he caused in the last film, the title seems to be yet another sign of how little thought Snyder and his writer Goyer are again putting in their next script.)

In many ways it’s a timeless argument – an ongoing rhetorical debate that delights in colliding our greatest pop cultural loves. Immediately preceding comic books every gothic monstrosity from Dracula to Mr Hyde to the Mummy was battling it out for popularity in cinemas and fiction (eventually also appearing in crossover films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943) and House of Frankenstein (1944); the spirit of which continue to this day with the Alien Vs. Predator franchise). In fact, I don’t doubt that there were at least two nerds way back in ancient Greece standing about bickering over who would win in a knock out street brawl between Poseidon or Apollo. (Poseidon. He’d play dirty.)

But no matter how much fun it is to bandy around comparisons and swim in hypotheticals, for a lot of people – myself very much included – the question of which superhero wins the day already has a definitive answer. It’s one of those ‘Who’s the best, not counting…’ kind of inquiries.

Because it’s Batman, right?

That’s certainly the answer I’ve had locked and loaded since I was a child – before I knew any of the intricacies of the Marvel and DC universes. Before I could parse the individual influences of figures like Jack Kirby, Alan Moore, and Steve Ditko upon their medium. Before Christopher Nolan and The Avengers films had rescued the superhero genre from its sad, cheesy stagnation. Even before the glorious Bruce Timm Batman Animated Series and its Superman and Justice League sequels. Before all of that, my mind was already firmly made up.

‘Nope. It’s Batman,’ I would reply. ‘Cause he doesn’t need dumb space magic to fight crime, and he’s not allergic to the colour yellow.’

(…Seriously. He can imagine into being a fully-functioning space ship to travel across the stars, but if someone comes at him with a handful of paint swatches labelled ‘Daffodil’ and ‘Buttercup’ and he crumbles?)

‘Well, what about Superman? He’s got laser eyes and can fly and stuff…’

‘Nup. Cause Batman can swing through the city with grappling hooks, and he doesn’t have any lame McGuffin weaknesses. …Except, you know, for all the crippling psychological despair.’

‘Wolverine’s got claws and fast healing…’

‘Batman’s got a utility belt and a stuffed dinosaur.’

‘What about Spawn?’

…

‘You’re not even trying anymore, are you?

It should be said that I have heard a stunningly persuasive argument made for Wonder Woman – but still, for me, that same trump card always applied: Batman is ‘best’ precisely because he doesn’t have the powers that the other heroes are gifted with. He punches well above his weight, a mere mortal amongst gods – not only meeting their gaze, but more often than not staring them down. The most human of all super-humans, he exemplifies the virtue of using wit and passion and dogged stubbornness to turn his weaknesses into strengths; to do what he knows is right, even if it’s never easy.

And that all seemed very persuasive for the longest time. Indeed, for a rabid Batman fan like myself, it offered a wonderfully smug sense of superiority. All other heroes just seemed lazy by comparison.

What’s that Spider Man? You want to complain about how the Daily Bugle doesn’t love you enough? Well why don’t you go cry about your super strength and spidey senses to your supermodel girlfriend. And how about you, Thor? Yeah, it must be tough being a magical, immortal, impervious Nordic prince. Who can fly. With those pecs. And you – shiny guy. What’s your deal? …Silver Surfer, you say? What, you just surf around everywhere? Through space? In the indentured service of a psychotic, galaxy-eating god? …Well, sucks to be you. At least you got a surfboard anyway.

And put some pants on.

But you know what? For all my years of confident self-satisfaction, hand-waving away all debate, the truth I’ve now come to realise is: I was wrong.

It’s not Batman – although I was in the right ballpark. Instead it’s that other hero in the winged-marsupial get up. The one too often swallowed by the big guy’s brooding, omnipresent shadow.

It’s Batgirl.

I realised because of the zipper.

IMAGE: Batgirl new costume (MTV News)

See, the past few weeks Batgirl has gotten some press due to her new creative team’s decision to update her costume along with some tweaks to the narrative. For the most part, it appears that the response to the new look has been positive; and personally, although I will always favour the Bruce Timm animated series redesign, I really like the new look too.

Thankfully Batgirl has never been a character over-sexualised in her depiction – no Power Girl cleavage-heavy swimsuits or fishnet anythings – and happily that tradition continues. The new uniform looks sleek and functional. Made up of a leather jacket, detachable cape, Doc Martens combo, it has character, it’s not just some new splash of purples and yellows on a cookie-cutter skin-tight spandex, or that weird goth-gimp mute batgirl they went with a few years ago (who, yes, I know, wasn’t Barbara Gordon).

It’s nice to see her outfit reflect more of her personality. Young, adaptable, stylish and practical. It’s colourful but not garish; chic but not some instantly-dated stab at being ‘hip’ (just go back and look at the original Superboy ’90s redesigns to see just how archaic trying to manufacture ‘cool’ can be). The whole ensemble is a piece of functional fashion that she chose to put on to do her job. And significantly, the Bat-insignia is not some grim shield emblazoning her chest.

It’s got a zip up the middle of it.

And that’s what got me thinking…

It made me realise: perhaps it’s no surprise that I’ve overlooked her for so long. After all, viewed superficially, Batgirl can seem more of an addendum than a protagonist in her own right: she was an addition to an already established franchise; she didn’t invent the whole ‘bat’ motif, she just cribbed it off the other guy. That bat isn’t a symbol of her operatically memorable origin story. She just wears it. She wasn’t even Batman’s first assistant. To those unfamiliar with the lore it might even seem like she’s meant to be lumped in with all the other ‘bat’-prefixed material – like Bat-Mite and Bat-Hound and the Bat-Cycle – as though she were not only subservient to Bruce Wayne’s tortured tale, but merely an accessory in service of it. She’s branded with his story, she doesn’t forge one of her own.

This tendency to disregard Batgirl’s autonomy has always dogged the character, stretching right back to her first ever incarnation. Some critics, such as Bill Boichel in ‘Batman: Commodity as Myth’ (The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and his Media, eds. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, London: Routledge, 1991, p.13) even argue that the initial version of ‘Bat-Girl’ (Betty Kane, who was the niece of ‘Bat-Woman’ Kathy Kane) was only ever introduced to serve as a lazy heterosexual love interest. Supposedly, she and her aunt were to be romantic pairings for Batman and Robin, blatant attempts to assuage the Comic Code Authority’s paranoid fears over a ‘homosexual’ agenda in the heart of the mythos. Sure, she went on colourful romps with the caped crusaders, fighting crooks and aliens and hypnotism and magical genies, but she was ultimately just in it for the chance to win over Robin’s heart – even though he had already pledged his heart to Lady Justice herself (swoon!)

As Will Brooker points out in his exceptional analysis, Batman Unmasked: Analysing A Cultural Icon (London, Continuum, 2000, pp.101-70), the truth of Bat-Girl’s introduction and her contribution to the text is far more multifaceted than this, but these marginalisations – whether real or imagined – have continued to occur throughout the character’s history. She’s considered decorative: a heterosexual disguise; an ingredient for a love triangle; a bone thrown to female readers. Indeed, sometimes it feels like people only bother noticing Batgirl when she’s got a snazzy new outfit, or the gossip media is making pissy comments about how ‘fat’ Alicia Silverstone looks in her rubber suit.

Indeed, such dismissals are why I have a problematical relationship with one of the most universally acclaimed Batman graphic novels of all time: The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland (DC Comics, 1988).

I’m not saying that The Killing Joke is a bad story. It’s rightfully considered one of the great Batman tales: a brief, harrowing glimpse into the perpetual conflict of Batman and the Joker, and the carnage that their entwined obsession leaves in their wake. For those who haven’t read it, it’s well worth seeking out. If for no other reason than that it introduces greater depth and complexity to the Joker, a character that had frequently been depicted as little more than a colourful buffoon. It has indelibly impacted every presentation of the clown prince since, even being directly cited as an inspiration for both Tim Burton and Heath Ledger in their iconic characterisations in cinema.

Briefly, the story concerns the Joker making one final, sociopathic statement about how frail the human psyche can be. He decides to show Batman how ‘one bad day’ can unhinge a previously moral, upstanding person, hoping to fracture the divide between hero and lunatic. To do this he decides to destroy Commissioner Gordon – Batman’s ally and the most upstanding man in Gotham – by surprising him in his house and brutally, savagely assaulting his daughter – going on to create a gruesome exhibition of her torture and pain.

And at this point you can probably predict what my issue with the story is. In order to tell a story such as this there had to be a real casualty – someone to symbolise that the Joker had finally gone too far. The Joker had to step over the line from killing random strangers (figures we, as readers, we can feel horrified about, but ultimately forget) to permanently, violently impacting one of the principle characters. In service of the plot, Moore selects Batgirl, now Barbara Gordon, to become that sacrificial lamb, turning her into another frustratingly familiar example of the ‘woman in a refrigerator’ trope since her suffering is used to cause Commissioner Gordon – and by extension Batman – the most acute possible pain. She gives them a reason to fight harder, to brood deeper, to feel even more.

Sure, in subsequent stories Barbara transformed into Oracle, rescuing herself from victimhood by proving to be all the more extraordinary – continuing to fight crime in spite of her disability – but for the span of Moore’s narrative, in service of the specific tale he was telling, she was reduced to the role of victim: shot, stripped naked, photographed (and as some have inferred, perhaps even raped). She’s not even shown being Batgirl. Her only actions throughout narrative (aside from squirming in agony) are to serve her father a cup of tea and nag him about getting his clothes dirty. In fact, to make the act even more arbitrary, the Joker doesn’t target Barbara because she’s Batgirl – he knows her only as Gordon’s daughter. So in a twisted irony she is punished not because of her crime fighting alter ego, but a quirk of fate in her parentage.

It reduces her, even if momentarily, to just another Bruce Wayne loved one to be savaged and tortured, to twist the knife of guilt into Batman’s gut just a little further. And that’s a shame, because this kind of chance brutality is a story trope that can, and has, been utilised well in the past – in the Batman universe, no less.

In the Batman AnimatedSeries episode ‘Over the Edge’, written by Paul Dini, Batgirl is killed by Scarecrow while on patrol, thrown from a building to land with a sickening crunch onto the roof of Jim Gordon’s car. But she’s not just arbitrarily slaughtered to make everyone feel bad – it’s shown to be the natural, unfortunate result of this weird, self-destructive campaign that the entire Bat Family are all on. It sends Bruce and Jim Gordon into a death spiral of mutual annihilation, with Gordon blaming Bruce for his daughter’s death, and Bruce, wracked with guilt, refusing to let his crusade end. Both men are shown finally broken, both having betrayed the moral fortitude that they maintained for so long in the wake of abject despair.

IMAGE: Batgirl sketch by Bruce Timm

Mercifully, the entire thing is revealed to be a Scarecrow-induced paranoid hallucination – ironically one dreamed by Barbara herself, thus, ultimately making it her story – but the message that the episode explores, and the unspoken bond it reinforces between Barbara, her father, and Bruce, is quite touching, and handled with an elegant subtly that Moore’s more vicious tale, for all its philosophical gesticulating, lacks.

But that’s just personal opinion (and perhaps it’s not fair to compare the two anyway – they are, after all, different narratives, in different mediums, for two different audiences). I can completely understand why Moore’s tale is such a beloved and respected work; but it’s a bugbear that gnaws at me whenever I return to it. Batgirl is stripped of agency, made subservient to Bruce’s story. And I don’t like seeing that, because, as I’ve come to realise, in truth, she transcends him. She always has.

After all, Batgirl fills the full Batman checklist, but she does far more besides. The vigilante crime fighting? Check. The detective skills? Check. The acumen to juggle an impossible double life? (Without just slapping a pair of cheap glasses on her face and calling it a day – I’m looking at you, Clark Kent.) Check. She’s tenacious. Brave. She’s a brawler, a gymnast, a thinker. And she does it all without Bruce Wayne’s Scrooge McDuck pile o’ money, his indentured slave Alfred, or the Martian Manhunter on speed dial. There’s more than a little bit if that old truism about Ginger Rogers in Batgirl: like Ginger Rogers with Fred Astaire, she does everything Batman does – only backwards, and in high heels.

More significantly though: Bruce needs trauma to be Batman. Even Moore’s story is just piling further pathos onto the narrative’s gloomy foundation. Having lost his parents to random injustice Bruce needs sorrow and guilt and despair to focus him. Fighting crime is the only way that he can channel his self-loathing and guilt. He uses it as a crutch. Same with Dick Grayson. Both seething orphans, their devotion to justice is a way to manifest their personal demons as an obstacle they can punch.

Bruce is compelled to become Batman as a form of self-preservation. Just as Harvey Dent becomes Two-Face, or Oswald Cobblepot becomes the Penguin – because they are all traumatised souls who have to lose themselves in an alternate persona lest they go loose themselves utterly to madness. Bruce’s false face is a hero, but his is still a disassociation motivated by fear.

In contrast, Barbara Gordon didn’t need her parents to die to spur her into action. She didn’t need to be personally effected or disenfranchised to feel compelled to serve her fellow citizens. She doesn’t have to stare into an abyss of despair and horror each night to feel a duty to act.

Maybe that lack of specific motivation is the product of narrative laziness on behalf of her creators. Maybe her original inclusion was merely a heterosexual romantic distraction. Maybe there was some patronisingly antiquated design about how a woman couldn’t be burdened with a dark origin story, that she needed to be fun and perky and fresh. I don’t honestly know. But whatever the reason she was created, the result is a character far more worthy of regard.

And that’s what brings me back to that new outfit, and that playful new zip-up bat logo…

Because, sure, it would be nice if she didn’t have to wear someone else’s symbol (even Robin got a private visit to the graphic designer for his upper-case R). But that in itself is indicative of how remarkable her character is. She chose that image. It wasn’t inflicted upon her by some personal terror or driving tragedy.

She takes that bat insignia – a symbol of one man’s mad, blind crusade – and redeems it, drags it out of the shadows and into the light. For Bruce, the bat is a dark alcove to hide within, to redirect fear upon those who would inflict fear upon others; Barbara, meanwhile, is leaping around in yellow. She takes a crusade born from, and mired within, fear, imbuing it with courage and selfless generosity.

Batgirl did something far more remarkable and far more heroic than being ‘chosen’: she chose for herself. She saw people suffering. She saw greed and cruelty and injustice. She saw some weirdo in a cape trying to do something about it, then did the most extraordinary thing of all. She decided she could help.

For the past three months Mark Hughes over at Forbes has been the principal cheerleader, advocate, and, in his comments section replies, aggressive defence council for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Since its release Hughes has been churning out articles and interviews (like this, and this, and this), applauding the film’s opening box office as proof of its greatness (even as audiences abandoned it in droves) and progressively chastising critics, fans, and people with the capacity to perceive moving images and sounds, for not agreeing that this exploding jar of stale urine was anything less than a masterpiece.

His latest offering has been prompted by the release of the Ultimate Edition of the film, but plays out all the hallmarks of his previous defensive articles. It has the usual adolescent attempt to paint anyone who saw through the original film’s asinine plot and direction as somehow being too stupid to understand how deep it was; implies a conspiracy of hive think amongst all the critics who aren’t him; and ties itself in knots trying to explain gaping holes in the film’s plot that, even when ‘explained’ by him in great detail, still remain patently idiotic.

Even the title of his article has a self-justifying silliness that typifies much of his commentary on the film: ‘Review: Batman v Superman: Ultimate Edition Expands Story And Wins Praise’. Reading the body of the article reveals that he doesn’t actually cite anyone else’s ‘praise’; he means his own. And since he already liked the first version, by that logic literally no one’s opinion has changed. Indeed, given that he thought the original version was a masterpiece, it’s a little peculiar to see him now enthusiastically argue that this new version ‘fixes’ the original film’s problems. It presumably ‘fixes’ something that was already perfect?

But a new twist in the oratory has appeared. And it comes in the form of a word that he uses to summarise all of the criticisms that have been levelled at the film since its release:

Deconstruction.

Batman v Superman, he says, was a ‘deconstruction’ of the Batman and Superman characters, and it was that – not its quality; not its incoherent plot; not its ugly, cynical, vacuous themes – that was the reason that the film was poorly received.

It is a term that is starting to surface frequently in defence of the film. Devin Faraci, in his recent recounting of a set visit to the filming of Justice League (inexplicably also being directed by Snyder) spoke of the way that ‘deconstruction’ was being offered as a sorry-not-sorry catch-all for any complaints that had been directed at Batman v Superman. According to producer Deborah Snyder, speaking to Faraci: ‘I think the main thing we learned is that people don’t like to see their heroes deconstructed.’

Again, it’s not that people want coherent narratives and characters that behave in logical ways, or a director who doesn’t treat his audience like imbeciles and who doesn’t overtly despise everything his protagonist represents. What they ‘learned’ was audiences don’t like to be challenged. That she and her husband Zack were just too visionary for an intransigent fan base to deal with it.

And yes, I know that there is clearly some saving-face going on there, and there are few filmmakers who would be humble enough to admit to having failed in their execution (let alone ones who missed the mark this spectacularly), but it still feels grossly disingenuous to imply that the problem here was that moviegoers just want to be fed the same regurgitated narratives again and again. Particularly when it appears that there are clearly a contingent pop culture reporters eager to accept this kind of retroactive justification without reservation.

For example, in just one of Hughes’ paragraphs he uses the word four separate times, flashing it about as a lazy bit of ‘I win’ rhetoric. And in its application he uses the term to frame an audience response that tries to deny them the right to dispute its quality:

Regarding tone, the Ultimate Edition changes a lot about the film, but one thing that remains is the overall somber, deconstructive nature of the story. If that bothered you, then …. I might strongly disagree with you about this film and about your preferences for tone etc in general, but I respect that it’s your opinion and personal preferences so you aren’t “wrong” for disliking somber deconstruction of (these?) characters.

Putting aside the fact that Hughes has been arguing (sometimes quite aggressively) for the past three months that you are indeed very wrong for having that opinion, he is now saying that you are free to argue with whether you like the film or not, but you can’t argue with it being ‘deconstructive’.

Except, yes you can.

Because here’s the thing. To badly paraphrase Inigo Montoya, that word doesn’t mean what Hughes thinks it does.

Even without deep diving into the history of critical theory first articulated by Jacques Derrida that has come to be known as ‘Deconstruction’, it is clear that this is cheap obfuscation. Audiences have always embraced legitimate deconstructions of their heroic myths. One need not even look further than the superhero films that bookended BvS’s release: Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War. Here were two films that actively subverted their audience’s expectations, genuinely deconstructing the conventions of their own narratives to great effect – and both, unlike Batman v Superman, were showered with praise for doing so.

In the case of Deadpool, an overly-familiar Frankenstein revenge quest was used to riff on the rote conventions of superhero filmmaking, and the result offered, alongside all its infectious fourth-wall breaking absurdity, an oddly affecting romance, arguably one of the better X-Men films of the bunch, and a palate cleanser for years worth of carbon copy action blockbusters.

IMAGE: Deadpool

In the example of Civil War, the established ideologies of the principle characters were broken down and flipped elegantly. Military pin-up boy, Steve Rogers bucks military authority to argue for self-regulation; Downey Jr.’s antiestablishment Tony Stark signs on for governmental oversight; Black Widow, the hardened amoral spy, desperately negotiates her way through the fray, trying to hold her makeshift family together. Each acts in ways seemingly contrary to their established personality, and yet all prove to be organic extensions of their cumulative experience, deconstructing their beliefs and rebuilding them anew. And that’s before the film even gets to the (for once) ingenious villain scheme that operates, not through external peril, but personal principle, resulting in a third act unlike any Marvel film before it – one that discards the generic lets-put-our-differences-aside-and-fight-the-big-bad crescendo that audiences have come to expect, and offering a climax that plays as a brutal, raw stoush between two friends who are finally pushed beyond ethos into pure emotion.

And even before these two examples there were films like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, an exploration of the price of order in the wake of the 21st century’s new paradigm of terrorism, or The Incredibles, a stylised analogy for familial dysfunction and the perils of fame, or even Richard Donner’s Superman, exploring the immigrant experience through colourful fantasy, and playfully satirising American ideology through Superman’s impersonation of both a human being and an icon. Numerous examples, stretching all the way back through the history of cinema. These characters have been broken down, critiqued, and reassembled since they first appeared on screen.

So suggesting that audiences can’t handle change, or claiming that Zack Snyder invented ‘deconstruction’ because he was able to indulge his objectivist fetishes after misreading Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, is ridiculous.

The real issue is that Snyder and his screenwriter Goyer had nothing to say beyond their grimdark posturing and mangled pseudo-philosophy.

Turning Superman, who has traditionally been a beacon of hope and optimism; an ideal for testing human morality on a grand scale of near-infinite power, into a whiny, narcissistic jag with a messiah fetish, is fine (actually it’s stupid, but whatever) – but you have to actually be exploring something after you do it. Otherwise you’ve just changed the character into something else for no reason. Making Batman a savage, gun-happy mass murderer might be an interesting subversion of everything he represents, if only there was some point to it beyond: ‘Lookit! HARDCORE!’ But similarly, there’s not.

You can turn Huck Finn into a vicious slave trader, turn Robinson Crusoe into a lazy shut-in, the Powerpuff Girls into three jacked-up male Mexican wrestlers with samurai blades, but none of that is ‘deconstruction’. At best it’s just mutation. It’s what DC once created ‘Elseworlds’ stories for, so they need not be beholden to the integrity of their characters and their universe. Indeed, Derrida himself specifically argued that it is not enough to simply tear something into its constituent parts and grunt nihilistically that everything can be undone; saying something is a ‘deconstruction’ does not excuse it from having to say something.

Consequently, what Batman v Superman offered felt immediately redundant. Snyder’s ‘deconstruction’ of his characters consists solely in ignoring their fundamental elements and recasting them as indulgent power fantasies. It plays more like a sketch comedy bit – like when Dora the Explorer gets remade as a gritty action film, or the Smurfs get played as a reclusive religious cult. And it is that lack of substance that renders the film a giddy, empty spectacle.

As Hughes somewhat disingenuously asserts in his article, however, taste is taste. People can like whatever they want, and for whatever reasons they want. Hughes himself obviously enjoyed the film. It was to his taste to see a psychotically homicidal character called Batman, and a sullen, impassive alien called Superman get tricked into punching each other for an hour. And that is genuinely fine (despite my clear distaste for it). But spending the next three months telling everyone else that they are wrong for not accepting this vision as their Batman and Superman, that they have bad taste for not liking the film, or that they fundamentally do not understand critical theory, is so specious an argument as to be farcical.

Speaking as someone who hated the film – both aesthetically and thematically – I think Hughes should just be happy that he enjoyed the film, and feel comforted that there are others who did too. That he could see something in it to like is a gift, not a pulpit from which to berate everyone who doesn’t agree. Because in the end, when the justification for liking something becomes so inextricably tied up in trying to prove that everyone else has missed the point, the only thing that ends up getting ‘deconstructed’ is an individual fan’s dependence upon grasping rhetoric.

Beyond that, there’s probably not much else that needs to be said. It’s been a few weeks since its release. The initial rush of the film’s critical panning, and the reactive rush of its defenders (usually accusing reviewers of being shameless Marvel fanboys involved in some grand conspiracy concocted by Disney and funded by the illuminati), has, for the most part, subsided. At this point the film can be judged on its merits…

And it’s a train wreck. People can see well enough for themselves what a stain this film has been on the DC universe. Admittedly there is fun to be had in this flop, but it requires work. If you can somehow divorce yourself from what a sophomoric hit job it does on three of the most iconic characters in modern history (Wonder Woman escapes this dumpster fire with the most dignity by virtue of being largely disconnected from the plot), it is actually kind of hilarious.

Not intentionally, of course.

There’s not a single successful joke or moment of levity in this whole turgid squall of unconvincing CGI. But it does take one of the (literally) stupidest plots ever conceived and treats it with such unearned gravitas and self-seriousness that it is impossible not to be amused. It’s like watching a Dumb and Dumber sequel directed by Werner Herzog.

‘This is all super deep and heaps philosophical and stuff,’ it pouts, before Lex Luthor jitters his way into frame, starts spouting gibberish, and the whole thing reveals itself to be based on an unfinished Power Rangers script.

The film even, ironically, ends up offering a better description of itself than any of its enraged film reviewers managed:

It’s an exploding jar of human pee.

If it only weren’t so interminably boring that kind of self-destructive numb-nuttery could be respected. But the film simply is what it is: exactly all that director Zack Snyder and screenwriter David S. Goyer are capable of producing. They threatened as much with their tone deaf, moronic Man of Steel, and they followed type here, leaning in to their own failure with an obstinate, unearned arrogance.

Countless articles have already agreed on the same handful of points. Yes, Jesse Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor was a twitchy Max Landis/Mark Zuckerberg caricature, insufferable to watch and unfathomably ridiculous in his motivations. No, none of the characters had any emotional or psychological coherency. Of course the film doesn’t follow through on any of the trite, pseudo-philosophical concepts it name-checks in its opening half. The fights were a grey mush with cartoon physics. The editing was disjointed. The dialogue stale. The pacing baffling. Zack Snyder’s juvenile fetishistic objectivism infected every frame of film. And yes, its best attributes, Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Jeremy Irons’ Alfred, were sidelined to make room for two-and-a-half interminable hours of watching a pair of narcististic, asshole psychopaths beating on everyone in sight because they are both too stupid to have a conversation that would literally clear up the entire plot in a sentence.

And if you make the mistake of trying to scratch the surface of the film’s meandering tangle of inane plot logic, you simply tumble down a well of idiocy from which there is no escape. Why did Luthor try to get Superman all riled up about Batman if he was just going to kidnap his mother anyway? Why did Luthor create an unstoppable killing machine? Who did he think would be able to stop it once it killed Superman? Why did Luthor …in fact, why did Luthor do literally anything he does in this film? Literally. Why did Wonder Woman think she could steal back a digital picture? Does she not realise how computers work? Why is phantom Pa Kent stacking rocks on a mountainside? He can’t be a memory, because he tells Clark a story that he had never told him before, so either Clark is just hallucinating some meaningless nonsense, or he’s talking to a ghost. Does this universe have ghosts now? And ‘Save Martha’?! On and on and on and on and on… Down the rabbit hole of stupid lazy narrative contrivance.

Similarly, there is no point dipping into the slew of incredibly ill-conceived ‘think piece’ articles that arose in the wake of the film’s simultaneous bad critical reception and mammoth opening weekend. Anyone trying to argue that the ‘age of the critic is dead’ or that ‘fans don’t care about quality’ is just wilfully peddling redundant clickbait. The reason for that momentary disparity is – and was at the time – painfully clear. Fans have been clamouring for a Batman and Superman film for generations – there is a reason why the World’s Finest comic crossovers have always sold out. But that doesn’t invalidate the cinema score of B, and a second week record drop off in ticket sales of 69% when it was facing no competition. The result is clear: the film’s initial monster box office prove that the idea of this film, not the film itself, drew people in. Sight unseen it broke box office records; once the audience got a look they rejected this mess completely.

But despite all this, I did want to share some of the thought that occurred to me as I watched this thing unfold. Not because I think they are particularly insightful or original, but because this film led me through a rollercoaster of realisations, some hopeful; at least one truly horrifying. So what follows is a kind of reverse director’s commentary (because it is the director I am frequently commenting upon)…

IMAGE: ‘Yeah, hi. We get the messiah imagery, Mr Superman. Thanks. Can you please just save us from drowning now?’

About ten minutes in – once the flashback within the fantasy within the dream sequence had already strangled the script into incoherency – I became aware of something that actually helped me let go of a lot of my anxieties. I realised, all at once, that neither Batman nor Superman actually appear in this movie. And I mean that literally. There are characters labelled ‘Superman’ and ‘The Bat’ that show up, characters that wear vaguely similar (if gothed-down) costumes, but even if there were a way to bring this up on a charge of copyright infringement, the case could ever be proved. Because nothing else of the history of the Batman and Superman characters remain. Every defining characteristic has been jettisoned so as to refashion them into the most derivative ultra-hardcore-awesome version of them possible.

Here, Superman mopes and abandons the world because he doesn’t like it when humanity asks him to please stop crushing them like bugs. Here Batman kills and uses guns. Here the death of his parents didn’t inspire him to try and prevent others from ever having to feel that same pain; it instead taught him to become a sociopath:

‘I bet your parents taught you that you mean something; that you’re here for a reason. My parents taught me a different lesson. Dying in the gutter for no reason at all. They taught me the world only makes sense if you force it to.’

This narrative is, I realised, just an Elseworlds edition, written by an angsty eleven year old. What, it asks, would it be like if Batman was a murderous, mutilating lunatic, hypocritically exploiting the death of his parents as an excuse to indulge his every urge for wanton mayhem because awesome? What if Superman was an aloof ubermensch, bored with the world and training himself to ignore its pain, who just wanted everyone to leave him alone for like five minutes, dad?! Geez!

In a move that serves as more of a commentary on his own psyche than anything that these icons have ever represented, Snyder – either profoundly misunderstanding the characters, or just not giving a damn because it looked superficially ‘cool’ – has hollowed out both figures into the narcissistic power fantasies of an entitled, self-righteous douchebag.You can almost hear the echo of teenage Snyder’s inner monologue moaning about how hard it is to be rich and powerful when everyone expects you to succeed.

At this point, around a third of the way through the film, after Metropolis and Gotham had been geographically established to be one city, I was becoming more and more surprised at exactly how much latitude DC and Warner Bros. had given a hack storyteller like Zack Snyder to cripple the world-building of their cinematic franchise.

To use just a couple of the several examples that present themselves during the film: Snyder decided that it would be hilarious to take the character of Jimmy Olsen – in the history of the Superman story, traditionally Superman’s loyal ‘pal’; overeager, if accident prone cub photographer – and immediately put a bullet in his head:

“We just did it as this little aside because we had been tracking where we thought the movies were gonna go, and we don’t have room for Jimmy Olsen in our big pantheon of characters, but we can have fun with him, right?”

He thought it would be fun. You know – like a psychopath.

And it struck me how absurd, and obtuse this decision was.** Because to non-fans watching the film Olsen appears as just some random CIA operative, killed as a display of hostility. The only people for whom this ‘joke’ lands, therefore, are those who are fans of these characters and their histories. To a fan – and only to a fan – the ‘joke’ is that a pivotal component of the mythos they love has been unceremoniously slaughtered for no reason. His death is not shown to have any unique impact upon any of the characters in the movie. It’s not done to make a point about sacrifice, or heroism. He’s just killed because, ha ha, you liked him and probably expected more. (Also, if you like Mercy Graves, Luthor’s assistant, don’t get too attached either.)

Snyder’s ‘gags’ consist of weaponising the history of Superman against the people who love it the most. What the viewer loves and recognises is used to hurt them. On a textual level it is analogous to the way Luther is later shown baiting Batman with the death of his parents, or ghoulishly blackmailing Superman by kidnapping his mother. Snyder aspires, apparently, to be like the unhinged jag-off he places as the antagonist of his hysterically buffoonish plot. And to his absolutely-no-credit, he succeeds.

His botched characterisation of Batman too shows a similar contempt for the future of the franchise. Because although having Batman indiscriminately use guns and murder criminals might be cool in the short term (‘Wow, he set that guy on fire!’ ‘Whee, he crushed that guy’s face with his car!”), it immediately undermines any future appearance of the character. Not only does it make him boring – any moron can grab a gun and run into the street to kill someone; what makes Batman extraordinary is that doesn’t resort to his enemy’s cowardice – it also means that in future there is no reason not to kill Joker or Two Face. Given that he has now proved himself willing to kill innumerable common street thugs (and knowingly brand them so that they can be killed by other people later) he cannot suddenly become precious about murdering his rogues gallery. The next time the Joker turns up in a film and Batman doesn’t immediately kill him, he will look like a hypocritical fool. And I don’t say that happily – I never want Batman to be judge, jury and executioner – I am merely pointing out that by this idiotic film’s own logic, his character has tipped over into a realm of murderous vigilantism from which he cannot return. They’ve either made him a boring killer, or a hypocrite. Either way, he is to become the mass-murdering, gun-toting, fascist head of this universe’s now thoroughly compromised ‘Justice League’. And that’s not the origin story of a team of ‘heroes’, it’s Dick Cheney’s dream journal.

IMAGE: ‘Well my dad’s name wasn’t Jonathan, SO YOU DIE NOW!’

Later, I would be even more shocked to recognise the wealth of source material that DC had allowed Snyder to burn off. Not only does he waste The Dark Knight Rises’ battle between Superman and Batman, but the Death of Superman story also gets worked over in a ‘surprise’ third act ‘twist’ (honestly, calling this a ‘twist’ is such a ludicrous capitulation to this story’s gormlessness that it beggars belief, but whatever). Rather than allowing Snyder to take a swing at one adaptation of an iconic story as he sought to set up their future franchises, for some reason they let him strangle two at once.

The Death of Superman, in particular, is a controversial storyline. It’s not that beloved, but it is famous. It’s iconic. More importantly, it’s a storyline that could have been used to great effect in a larger arc of movies, something built to over multiple films that would have been enormously impactful and bold. Instead, it was turned into a weird narrative Hail Mary at the end of an already overstuffed film, robbed of all of its gravitas. It simultaneously removes all stakes from both Superman’s death (instead of the world losing a Superman that they admire, everyone is just freed the headache of having this super-powered alien stomping around their major cities) and his inevitable return (once it becomes clear that he can just die and come back from the dead arbitrarily, what future stories can threaten him?)

And it probably goes without saying that the clumsy setup for the larger DC universe was underwhelming. Crammed into the lead up to the title fight by way of an unnecessary cameo by Wonder Woman (don’t get me wrong, I liked Gadot’s take on Diana Prince, but she had no reason to be in this plot), the best the film could concoct was a USB filled with trailers for Warner Bros.’ upcoming cinema releases? Suddenly Lex Luthor, the inept bad guy whose greatest success was sneaking a jar of piss into a government building, has proved himself so bad at his job that he actually gathered together and named the members of the Justice League, just cause? He even gives them logos! Just like shoving Gotham and Metropolis across the bay from one another; just like making Batman a murderer because it’s cool; it’s narratively expedient (read: lazy), but shrinks this universe into a series of hackneyed conveniences.

Bafflingly, Warner Bros. and DC allowed a film to be made that leaves almost no wiggle room to build a future universe. While Marvel’s long-term storytelling gradually thread individual stories into an expanding whole until The Avengers burst through the screen, Batman v Superman tries to immediately barf a universe into existence at once, and fumbles it on every level. Narratively. Thematically. It paints future directors and artists into corners from which they cannot escape. In their kneejerk response to the catch up to the Marvel franchise, DC seems to have allowed Snyder free reign to burn down their enterprise before it is even gets started.

By the time Superman helped armed terrorists get away by smashing up Batman’s car and the two ‘heroes’ were shoving each other through buildings, it became clear to me how utterly Snyder had even missed the point of each of the graphic novels he was ‘adapting’. Snyder, in countless interviews, has bleated on and on about what a fan of comic books he is. They are his source material, he claims. His bible. He has actors read them on set to help achieve the vision of the original work. But it became clear that had he actually bothered to read any of the material from which he was stealing his aesthetics, he would have noticed the innumerable, direct contradictions in his plot points that bastardise the spirit of the original texts.

Snyder has repeatedly justified his presentation of the Batman character by citing Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, a story he said shows Batman drinking and killing and using guns. But even a cursory glance at the source material reveals every part of this statement to be factually wrong. The retired Bruce Wayne stops drinking when he becomes Batman again. His no killing rule doesn’t waver – he cannot even bring himself to kill the Joker. That becomes the whole point of their final conflict, Joker kills himself just to ‘win’. Batman uses rubber suppression bullets in is Batmobile (honest). He even makes the opposite argument about using guns himself. In a pivotal moment of the story Batman holds up a firearm and states unequivocally to his forces: This is the weapon of the enemy. Of cowards. We don’t use these. That’s right: even the gristled old fascist, secessionist nutbag Batman of Frank Miller wont resort to the weapon that slaughtered his parents.

Similarly in the Death of Superman – a pretty dumb story, frankly, but one that is illustrative of what makes the character of Superman great – the point was not that Superman is so stupid he blindly runs in and gets himself killed by a storming rock monster. It’s that he is willing to literally be the last one fighting. The fact that in Snyder’s contrived ending Superman ignores Wonder Woman’s help – she who could have gone in and stabbed Doomsday with the kryptonite spear without dying immediately – is just another sign of how woefully myopic Clark is in this version.

It has always been obvious that Snyder is not the ‘visionary’ his advertising material declares him to be, but rather a mimic. For years he has been humoured for taking comic book panels and slavishly recreating them on film. His 300 and Watchmen films were in good part just live action restagings of the original books’ imagery (smothered with grain and sepia filters). But that’s not adaptation. At the very best it is translation. In another context it would be plagiarism. It’s certainly not evidence of someone with a vision, but rather a person who has to ape the work of others to make up for their own shortfall in creativity. What is surprising, though, is that the decisions he makes in Batman v Superman show that despite his apparent adoration of all the pretty pictures, Snyder clearly never bothers to read the words coming out of the character’s mouths. He takes a comic book medium too often unjustly accused of superficiality and, by transporting them to the screen actually does just turn them into empty pictures.

And all this made me realise, as I watched the myriad ways that the DC universe was collapsing in on itself, that Batman v Superman might very well be the most cynical, spiteful film ever made. It hates its characters. It hates its own world, and goes out of its way to undermine any subsequent worlds that might be built upon its ashes.

Most of all it hates you. The audience. The viewer. Anyone foolish enough to want to go on its gaudy, wilfully asinine journey. It clearly thinks that you – that I, that all of us – are stupid. It does patronising things like telling us – multiple times – that there are no civilian casualties in the smouldering wreckages of Metropolis and Gotham, and it actually believes its audience is obtuse enough not to question that logic***. It runs trailers for the perpetual forced franchise it wants you to invest in amidst a single film that has already descended into unintelligible drivel. It alters the characterisations of its heroes to make them actively moronic and thuggish. Thomas Wayne takes a swing at his mugger, endangering his wife and child with his pigheaded heroics. Batman is tricked by Lex Luthor into behaving like a narrow-minded goon. Superman is a self-loathing blank slate. Mythic, complex characters are stripped of all their poetry and grace as Snyder’s inane, nihilistic, masturbatory slurry takes everything good, or original, or unique about these characters, and turns it into the same shallow, washed-out slow motion show reel he has been making for the past dozen years.

IMAGE: Why does no one appreciate my super city-destroying powers?

And it was around here, in this cascade of bad will, that I had the darkest, most horrific realisation that has ever flittered through my mind. Truly, I am about to utter words that have rocked me to my core. Watching Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman, I thought to myself:

I wish this had been directed by Michael Bay.

That’s right. Michael goddamn Bay.

You have no idea the amount of loathing I had for myself at that moment – but it was true. Watching the man who had shown such contempt for Superman in Man of Steel get his hands on Batman too – seeing Snyder turn another character defined by their compassion and moral fortitude into facile grimdark slurry – it broke me. As did knowing that he was about to get his fingerprints on Wonder Woman too. Having the ‘motivational’ speech of the film, Pa Kent’s ghost/dream/whatever speech to Clark on the top of a mountain for no reason, be yet another reminder that trying to be good, and trying to help others only ever ends in disaster – I just snapped.

I thought to myself, has there ever been a more asinine and adolescent vision of heroism in the history of film? In the history of narrative? Why, I wondered, is Zack Snyder telling these stories if heroism for him is just a gigantic pain, where the hero hates himself, the people hate him, and nothing is motivational or aspirational; it’s all just a ridiculous power-fantasy where the guy in the cape just spends his time moping because everyone doesn’t love him unconditionally enough? I was watching my favourite characters, and the whole DC universe around them, mutate before my eyes into a dreary, cynical mess in which heroism is not just actively discouraged, it must be constantly reiterated as futile; an enactment of Ayn Rand’s objectivism in colourful spandex, superficial and selfish and vile.

It was a bleak world view so puerile and oppressive that I started to realise: literally the only thing this film has going for it is spectacle. I realised that Warner Bros. have allowed Snyder to sacrifice the heart of their franchise for empty pyrotechnics. They wanted to do Transformers business: ragingly success films largely devoid of character and plot, that function purely to move from one expensive spectacle to the next.

And if that is what they want, I realised, they should just get Michael Bay. I realised – feeling a swell of revulsion as I said it – that I would easily rather have Bay direct a Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman film than Zack Snyder. I would actually prefer his signature cheesy, brutal, obtuse filmmaking style over all this unearned nihilistic posturing.

Because then, at least, you get your spectacle. Whatever else you might think of Bay – and I don’t think much – the man can film explosions. But more than that, his weird fetishism for Americana – his obsession with soldiers portrayed as gods on earth, with hot apple pies and American flags waving – would, albeit clumsily, actually speak to some of the themes of these characters.

Bay, in spite of himself perhaps, would present a Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman that were symbols of hope. It might be a very childish vision of hope – and of truth and justice – but you would certainly get your ‘American way’. It might look, in cinematic terms, like a child’s crayon drawing, but it would at least capture the thumbnail sketch of these heroes with some neat looking flames thrown in for good measure. (On second thoughts, you might want to get someone other than Bay to direct Wonder Woman or things could get disturbingly pervy. )

Snyder, despite being equally juvenile in his output, is the complete opposite of Bay’s spirit. In his efforts to set up a ‘cool’ alternate universe, in which truth and hope are ignored, while never actually deconstructing or examining those ideas, what he actually reveals is that he and his universe are devoid of vision. You cannot even enjoy the pretty pictures then, because they become representative of nothing.

So thanks for that Warner Bros. You made a film so bad that I would actually welcome Michael Bay getting his grubby, baby-oil slathered fingers on my favourite iconic characters.

I need a shower.

IMAGE: The best thing in the movie; barely in the movie

But this brought me to my final realisation. It’s now the end of the film; the characters have waved at a CGI monster on a green screen for twenty minutes, and I have watched Superman arbitrarily die …and felt nothing. I, who at twelve years old fanatically bought every comic leading up to the death of Superman. I, who stood in place (it only felt right to stand as I read that issue), stunned as I opened that final fold-out page and saw him slump back dead into the dirt. I, who ridiculously bought into the hype that he really was gone, and felt genuinely haunted by what I had just read. I watched that story enacted on the cinema screen, and felt nothing at all.

And if that moment had so little effect on me, I can only imagine how miniscule the impact must have been for average viewers who had no such adoration for the character. It got me thinking. About the second week skydive in ticket sales for this film (which puts it in the category of Green Lantern and Wolverine: Origins)****, about the critical backlash (it remains pinned at 28% on Rotten Tomatoes), about the horrid word of mouth. I wondered if it was this emptiness of spirit, symbolised by this hollow ending, that audiences have been rejecting? The lack of genuine ideological conflict in the clash between these two characters – so contrived that it can be resolved by a piece of comic book trivia? Martha indeed. Because once you’ve seen the only thing that Snyder can offer – the spectacle – there is nothing to return to. No aspiration. No joy. No subtext.

Snyder has traded on eighty years of good will and audience investment in these characters. He has taken figures that have built mythologies and made them unrecognisable, emptying their narratives of meaning. And now that Warner Bros. and DC have tried to build a world upon a foundation of nihilism and cynicism, without replacing the elements of that universe that they let be desecrated, all that is left is a universe devoid of substance. Nothing for an audience to return to, to mull over or take inspiration from. And if heroes don’t have morals, or ideals, or identifiable struggles, if they are all just CGI splash and grating sonics, they fade instantly. Their films die near immediately at the box office. They themselves dissolve near immediately in the mind. Once the spectacle is consumed, it instantaneously fades.

And that made me, amidst all of this despair and mess, cautiously hopeful. Because this film’s relative failure – initially buoyed by the hopes of an audience that were dashed upon seeing the final product – is a harbinger of the failure that awaits the DC cinematic universe if they follow the patented Snyder brand of dreary, superficial mediocrity. And since Warner Bros. cannot afford to risk a repeat of this scenario – audiences are less likely to fall for this trick again – that doesn’t look so likely as it had before.

To end on a happier note: it’s for this exact reason that so many viewers have become fixated on Gal Gadot’s smile. Wonder Woman’s flash of excitement is the one thing that shines bright amidst this turgid, dreary mess of a film. Because that smile implies joy. It implies hope. Amidst all this droning CGI carnage, that one movement the lips implies a depth of character – or at least just another layer to a character – that is lacking everywhere else on the screen.

And what that suggests to me is that Warner Bros., if they have the clarity to see the audience reaction for what it is – unbridled excitement for the film, and complete disinterest in what Snyder and Goyer presented – it could signal a fundamental redirection for this universe.

And the signals are there that this could already be happening. The upcoming Suicide Squad has now gone back for reshoots to bump up its character interaction, something sorely missing from Snyder’s film in which Superman and Wonder Woman do not even speak; the director of Aquaman, James Wan, has already distanced himself from Snyder’s oppressive, joyless tone.

But as the film finally sputtered to an end after several tedious fake-outs, I realised that even if none of these dreams come to fruition, even if in two years Zack Snyder is still turning Justice League into a seven hour joyless, glowering dirge, at least I still have The Flash and Supergirl to watch – shows that aren’t embarrassed by joy and inspiration. Shows that actually like their own characters, and respect their audience, and that are comfortable enough in their skin not to need to pose and posture and misquote philosophies they don’t understand just to sound cool.

And with that I fired up the Supergirl/Flash crossover episode again, and happily lost myself in a world where superheroes still have something worthwhile to say about life.

IMAGE: So much better than anything in this film it’s embarrassing

* If you want to hear my opinion of the glowering, dour sociopath that was Snyder’s Man of Steel, read here.

** To be clear, it was only after reading the credits that I realised murdered photographer was Olsen, but the meaninglessness and callousness of that death, so early in the picture, had been weighing on me the whole time, proof that Snyder had happily refused to learn anything about the criticism Man of Steel had received for its cavalier brutality.

*** Presumably Snyder’s feelings were hurt when people criticised the gleeful collateral damage of Man of Steel, but he could only be bothered paying the most glib lip service to that complaint.

**** As I type this during its third weekend after release, the film was beaten outright by critically panned Melissa McCarthy comedy The Boss.

New from Warner Bros merchandise! Re-molded from unsold Green Lantern stock – it’s the toy range to accompany the hot new film:

Gotham Gun Man V Inscrutable Alien Narcissist: Dawn of Jaundice

Relive all the Sturm und Drang fun of your favourite two asinine Jesus metaphors as they glare at each other and commit literally countless acts of murder!

CHOOSE YOUR MOPEY SOCIOPATH!

Play as your favourite dour, overpowered lunatic! Massacre your enemies! Savage bystanders! Pretend that nightshift workers and late night traffic don’t exist as you embark upon a senseless, easily-avoided rampage of savagery!

IMAGE: Gunman talking to himself, totally not embarrassed…

PLAY AS THE GOTHAM GUNMAN!

Become the thing you despise as you slip into hypocritical spiral of serial killing! Commit countless gun-related homicides while playing as a man haunted by the death of his parents at the barrel of a gun! Includes branding iron accessory! Practice mutilating your cowering victims so that they can be murdered later in prison!

Play the world’s greatest detective as a thug dudebro too stupid to know that he is being played for a fool by everyone that he meets!

Gunman Mobile comes with machinegun attachment and spatters of brain-matter on the bumper!

IMAGE: The ‘S’ stands for slaughter

OR PLAY AS INSCRUTIBLE ALIEN NARCISSIST!

Play the world’s most iconic inspirational hero recast as a petulant, omnipotent cry baby!

Get sidelined from your own sequel! Be responsible for an event a thousand times worse than 9/11! Turn a terrorist you could easily disarm into a wet paste! Continue your creepy obsession with your girlfriend and your mother at the expense of every other living creature on Earth! Stand idle with a constipated expression as an entire building filled with innocent people blows up around you! Generally be a dick to everyone! Die for arbitrary reasons! Scowl disdainfully at humanity as you leer over them like a demigod!

Learn about Ayn Rand’s bogus philosophy of glorified narcissism! Help director Zack Snyder live out his adolescent Atlas Shrugged power fantasies as you turn heroes that have always been defined by their compassion and devotion to humanity into brutal, nihilistic, myopic assholes, whining about how no one appreciates how exceptional they are.

Like a real hero!

IMAGE: Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!

YOU BE THE FILMMAKER!

Use flashbacks and flash forwards and visions! Imbed a dream within a dream within a time travel premonition because you saw Inception once! Allow yourself to become a cynical shill for your parent company as you lazily cram several film’s worth of foreshadowing, and a blatant trailer reel for your upcoming products, into an already farcically incoherent plot!

Smash your toys together for an interminable hour, letting the migraine inducing cacophony of grinding plastic distract you from the realisation that the entire narrative could literally be resolved with a simple conversation!

Shoot Superman’s pal Jimmy Olsen in the f**king head! While you are feeling nauseous, be comforted by the thought that Zack Snyder thinks this is funny!

Try to convince yourself that Zack Snyder is not a joyless psychopath!

AND HEY, REMEMBER WONDER WOMAN?

Relive the only moment of light in this oppressive nightmare! You know, that moment where Wonder Woman kind of half-smiles? Try to hold on to that fleeting sensation of joy as this vapid nihilistic hate screed of a film turns everything you adore about these characters and the DC universe into a turgid, spiteful, wilfully stupid brown muck!

I just wish there was somewhere I could watch a film where Superman was a depressed, psychotic narcissist with a messiah complex, Batman was a stupid, easily duped, gun-totting murderer, and Wonder Woman (arguably the best character in comic book history) was sidelined into a bit-part by all the asinine adolescent male angst in the plot.

Also, if there was a giant CGI turd monster that everyone could punch for an hour, that would be great.

Last month I wrote an article on Batgirl (published over at PopMatters). Inspired by her new costume redesign, it was really just an excuse to talk about how fantastic the character of Batgirl is, despite being too often overlooked as just an extension of the Batman franchise.

As an opinion column I guess it was serviceable – if a little shambolic. To use a truly tortured analogy, it was meant to be much like the new outfit itself: all concise and sleek lines. Clean. Clear. Snappy. I was going to bring up the outfit; use it to talk a bit about why Batgirl is profoundly cooler than she’s traditionally been given credit for; try to resist the urge to make snotty comments about Aquaman; sign out. Bip bop boom.

Instead (as so frequently seems to occur with my work) it became rather more rambling. Not necessarily in a bad way, it just took a few indulgent meanders. To continue stomping the outfit metaphor to death, I mentioned the character of Spawn in there at one point (I held back on the Aquaman, so he got a blast), and the further I got along, the more it felt like what I was actually writing was a version of his ensemble: all extraneous cape, superfluous chains, and over-stylised logos all over the place.*

And ARGH! Lookit! I’m doing it all over again! Apparently I can’t help my little self.

In any case, the point is that there was a section I cut out of that piece that I wanted to quickly discuss here. During the article I reference one of DC’s most famous graphic novels, The Killing Joke, by Alan Moore, a near-universally beloved work that has had an indelible impact upon all subsequent depictions of the Batman mythos, and the character of the Joker in particular.

Except… I’m not its biggest fan.

I don’t think it’s bad, or anything. I can absolutely see why it retains such special place in people’s hearts. But there are elements of that book that do bother me, that ultimately get in the way of me considering it one of the great Batman tales. And yet for some reason it keeps drawing me back, keeps asking me to reconsider it as something more.

As I explain in the article, foremost amongst my issues with the comic, is the problematic way in which it treats its female characters. The Batgirl character in particular is completely marginalised, turned into a victim to be savaged, thereby ‘motivating’ the real heroes of the story: her father Commissioner Gordon, and her vigilante ‘father’ Batman.

For fairly obvious reasons, I’m not a huge fan of how that narrative mechanic takes a strong, proud, capable and autonomous character like Barbara Gordon, and reduces her to a casualty – particularly so as she’s not even punished for being Batgirl, but rather just Jim Gordon’s daughter. From serving her father tea and complaining that he’s getting his laundry dirty, she’s paralysed, stripped naked and photographed; literally turned into a gruesome art-object to titillate the Joker, torment Gordon, and (although the Joker doesn’t realise it) enrage the Batman.

And when you dig further into the tale, she is not even the only woman cynically discarded to further the plot progression for its principle male cast. In flashback, the Joker is shown to have had a wife and unborn child. It is presumably for them that he gets involved with some mobsters who want him to help them break into a chemical factory, to ‘prove [himself] as a husband … and as a father’. However, both Joker’s wife and child die, unseen (an electrical fault in a baby bottle heater), only to be reported dead after the fact. They become just plot beats used to legitimise the fracturing of his psyche – even though, weirdly, this new widower’s response isn’t shown to be much more than, ‘Well, I don’t need to pull that heist anymore, guys…’ In an uncomfortable way, it almost feels like, in death, the narrative is blaming his wife even more for his circumstance, since he was only apparently turning to crime to support her.

That might well sound like petty nitpicking – he is the proto-Joker, after all. Human empathy may have never been one of the principle features of his personality. And it’s also true that if this is indeed all meant to come across as psychologically devastating, I would prefer quiet understatement to him throwing his head back in a William Shatner-style roar to the heavens. But it does consequentially undercut exactly how far he ‘falls’ from grace if you are trying to read his narrative arc as a tragedy. If this is a guy who can slough off the decimation of his entire family with little response (only later that day while going through with the robbery anyway, albeit against his will, he remarks how surprising it is that he should still be remembering his wife) then it is difficult to empathise with him or feel much pity. It’s only after he takes a bath in a toxic soup and he is personally, physically effected that his psyche seems to snap, which risks making him seem all the more selfish, and his family all the more redundant.

Of course, the other, far more interesting interpretation (the one that I prefer to believe) is that none of this is true anyway. This curiously emotionally subdued back story of lost love and a reluctant descent into crime is just a fantasy that the Joker himself has made up, one of the many lies that he has told himself to graft some semblance of self onto the twisted, irrational void of his personality. It would explain why the wife and child are so peripheral and disposable; they are just ciphers in his playacting. ‘Jeannie and Junior’, names so rote and alliterative that they really are just (imaginary) baby steps away from the real, unwavering focus of his egotism: Joker. We don’t see or feel their deaths because they are just manufactured excuses for his behaviour. And we wouldn’t want them drawing focus away from the real star: the guy wandering around in the bright costume and permanent stage-smile.

But if that is true, if Joker’s ambivalence is a sign of his blind selfishness, then it makes the treatment of Barbara even more important. And sadly, she too is dismissed when its plot convenient. In the present, real world of the story, when Batman arrives on the scene to save the day, Jim Gordon doesn’t even ask about his daughter – who as far as he knows might well be dead. At that moment, as far as Jim knows, his daughter has been shot through the gut, brutalised by sociopaths, and left to bleed out on their carpet.** Literally the last time he saw her she was naked, surrounded by a gang of lunatics, and screaming in pain. And yet as Batman swoops in, his first line is not ‘Barbara?’ (indeed, we never see him ask that); instead he’s preoccupied with warning Batman not to step over the line, insisting, ‘I want him brought in by the book’. Although trying to tamp down his shock, his primary concern is that Batman not lose his composure, do something crazy and prove the Joker’s crazed pessimism right.

Now, that may just be some heretofore undiscovered Jim Gordon superpower – Mega-Stoicism? Emotion-dampening? Hyper-suppression? – but for a human being, the whole ‘Don’t let the Joker win this moral debate’ would probably take a momentary backseat to, ‘Hey, is my daughter – you know – alive?’ Particularly so if this final confrontation, as Gordon’s dialogue suggests, is about disproving the Joker’s dispassionate narcissism.

The response to much of this criticism will be, of course, that this is ultimately not a story about these women. Barbara, Joker’s wife, the ‘Fat Lady’ who recurs throughout as a background gag (a poster featuring her at one point even reads ‘Gals, Be Glad It Ain’t You’ – which for all the women in this narrative seems profoundly true); they are all, by necessity, subservient to the psychodrama being played out amongst the three leads. But again, if the point of the story is to draw a distinction between the Joker and Jim (if not the Joker and the Bat), then having them both seen to be forgetting their loved ones in pursuit of some ethos seems an odd, counterintuitive choice.

But, again, I freely admit: I’m being fussy. It’s a powerful story, even if it has to sideline or undermine characters I love in service to its end.

And speaking of that ending, I guess before I go I probably should offer my opinion of the issue of its contrary interpretations. Because in recent years, whenever the subject of The Killing Joke arises, the inevitable question of what exactly is happening on that final page rears its head.

The debate, largely fuelled, as far as I can tell, by writer Grant Morrison, is that the traditional reading of the story – that Batman catches the Joker, restrains himself from enacting revenge as Gordon implored him, and then the two of them, Clown and Crusader, share a morbid laugh over a deranged joke that the Joker decides to recount – is wrong.

Morrison believes that this is a misunderstanding of the ambiguity Moore intentionally left in his story. For him, and for those who share his reading, when the comic panels tilt focus down to the glistening puddles in the street, Batman actually does finally snap and strangles the Joker to death, ending their perpetual war in a ghoulish failure.

To be fair, the pun title of the book can be seen to lean toward this interpretation. The Killing Joke – not just a joke that cracks up its audience, but a joke that kills, that finally sends Batman over the edge.

But I just don’t see it.

Firstly, more than anything else, it would just seem like lazy plotting in service of a cheap shock tactic; after all, Batman spends the latter portion of the book rubbing it in the Joker’s face that he didn’t win, that the Joker is the only broken savage in the story despite inflicting the worst that he could on others. To then arbitrarily change his mind and kill him anyway not only undermines the agony of that stoicism and proves the Joker right, it seems weirdly antithetical. The reason that grim denouement exists is because they’ve both already lost. The Joker failed to drag anyone else down to his level; the Batman realises that he’s never going to be able to pull his enemy out of this inevitable death spiral; so faced with the inescapability of their intractable, unchangeable path toward ruin, they share a laugh – a joke about two other lunatics trying to escape, but too lost to madness to help themselves. Killing him after they both came to that realisation would not only be cheap, it would actually make the opposite, less tragic point.

Obviously the focus shifts away from the action and the noise fades out, but that just seems more about Moore trying to evoke that sense of cyclical quietude than an implication of murder. The reason that the panels tilt down, returning us to that very same image of the light reflected in the rain puddle, the image with which this whole story begins, is because is it, ultimately, about these two lunatics in their irresolvable cycle. It becomes a narrative ouroboros, starting all over again – Batman and Joker, trapped together forever. The people around them continue to get chewed up, but the heroism and tragedy of their circumstance likewise continues to fuel more stories. Neither of them can change, but neither will stop trying to change the other either.

It’s no doubt why I keep coming back to this tale myself, despite my reservations. Because there really is a marvellous magnetism to these two characters that is perhaps best encapsulated in this gloomy vignette. It’s just a shame that an arguably even more interesting character had to be sacrificed in order to render that portrait in its most potent form.

IMAGE: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland (DC)

* And even then I left out a cranky old man rant about how the youngins today don’t know what it was like before comic book films were legitimised. What with their Captain America: Winter Soldiers and Guardians of the Galaxies… They never had to live through the nightmare of Steel or the artery-clogging cheese of Superman 4: The Quest for Peace or f**king Batman and F**king Robin. And don’t even make me bring up Howard the Duck! That’s a whole other parcel of emotional horror I dare not unpack. …Although I guess they did have to contend with Green Lantern and X Men Origins: Wolverine, so maybe we have all seen some soul withering stuff.

** More specifically, he actually shoots her in the pelvis, which opens up a whole other potentially loaded assault on gender riff that I shall leave unexplored.

Last month the comic book iteration of the ongoing Batman saga suffered a savage blow when the most recent incarnation of Batman’s protégé, Robin, was killed in action. In this current version of the narrative, the boy wonder was Bruce Wayne’s own son, Damian Wayne (his mother was Talia al Ghul) – thus his death marks not only the loss of Batman’s partner in his crusade for vengeance, but also the devastating personal tragedy of losing a child.*

DC comics decided to symbolically acknowledge the enormity of Wayne’s grief by stripping away some of the primary narrative devices with which the comic book medium communicates. Written by Peter J. Tomasi and illustrated by Patrick Gleason, Batman and Robin #18 (the first in that series set after the murder of his son) was an issue that made the bold choice to be conveyed entirely in silence.

Gone were speech bubbles and narration. The cacophony of internal monologues and explosions and fisticuffs fell away. Batman was depicted alone in a sorrowful quietude, trying to fill the numb, yawning hush that enveloped him by beating down a gauntlet of thugs, using them to tangibly manifest his rage and self-loathing, and brutalising himself for the selfish folly of adding another victim to the altar of his quest for vigilante justice.

It is a powerful vignette in the history of Batman, a reminder of the familial trauma that first set Wayne on his subversively heroic path – inspiring him to remake himself into a symbol of fear – and offering new proof of the ultimately sacrificial nature of this Sisyphean quest. Damian is, of course, not the first loss that Batman has faced in his expansive, multifaceted career. Indeed, another Robin – hot-headed street kid Jason Todd, had already similarly been killed, savagely beaten down by the Joker (only to be subsequently brought back from the dead)**; Batgirl was gunned down and paralysed, also by the Joker (although she appears to be currently healed); and one-time ill-fated Batman replacement Jean-Paul Valley, or Azrael, eventually gave his life in the pursuit of justice (Joker wasn’t involved as far as I know, so maybe that one will stick). But even with the tragic evidence for Batman’s ruinous journey continuing to stack up, Wayne still finds himself surrounded by those who choose to join him in his fight.

It is also a tale that (silently) speaks directly to a strange incongruity at the centre of Bruce Wayne’s psyche: his justified fear in endangering those dearest to him, and his irrational longing to nonetheless share a fundamentally solitary calling. And it is this repeating pattern, this seemingly unavoidable gravitational pull toward creating a makeshift crime-fighting (sometimes literally) family, that reveals a wonderfully complex and irrational contradiction at the heart of the Batman mythos…

Because when one thinks of the image of Batman, the picture that springs to mind is often the lone vigilante, waging a one-man war on crime – a stark, solitary silhouette cutting the skyline from his perch above, and abstracted from, the human community he seeks to protect.

He works alone. Solitary. One man against the cold unfeeling void…

And yet… There’s Alfred. And there’s Robin. And Nightwing. And Batgirl too. And Oracle. And Azrael. And Red Robin. And Huntress. And both Commissioner Gordon and his moustache. And the Birds of Prey. And Catwoman, sometimes. Even Superman gets a guernsey on occasion. …Indeed, from what I understand, the storyline in which Damian died was actually part of a continuity where Wayne has effectively corporatized the Batman identity, turning the urban legend of ‘The Batman’ into a worldwide, crime-fighting industry with a sprawling staff.***

Even in the most recent Nolan film – part of a brooding trilogy that depicts Wayne as a broken, sorrowful figure, alone on an introspective quest for peace that is literalised in the disquiet of Gotham’s criminal underworld – Batman still manages to pick up a sidekick. In the figure of John Blake (real name ‘Robin’), a devoted police officer who becomes disenfranchised by the bureaucratic restraints and deceit of a corrupted legal system, who decides to follow in the wake of the resurrected Batman, eventually, perhaps, going on to take up his mantle…

Likewise in Frank Miller’s acerbic take on the dénouement of the Batman saga, The Dark Knight Returns (1986), the colourful sprite fighting alongside the Goya shadow is an integral, unavoidable part of the equation. Just as the gristled, alcoholic, almost burnt-out Wayne is reconditioning himself to reclaim the cape and cowl, he is soon training Carrie Kelley, the tenacious thirteen year old, to likewise take up her predecessors’ tragic mantle as the new Robin.

Somehow, despite himself, this character, wracked with inconsolable sorrow and introverted rage, inevitably amasses a family of likeminded misfits, inspired to follow him on his impossible journey to curb the felonious extremes of the social order….

In Batman and Me (California: Eclipse, 1989), Bob Kane, the creator of Batman, recalls the conception of the Robin character, remembering the intentional contrast, both aesthetically and emotionally, that the inclusion of this companion would provide:

‘The brightness of Robin’s costume also served to brighten up the visuals and served as a counterpoint to Batman’s sombre costume. More significantly, the addition of Robin gave Batman a permanent relationship, someone to care for, and made him into a fatherly big brother rather than a lone avenger’ (p.46).

Robin (and arguably all those other companions that have followed in his wake) allowed other aspects of Bruce Wayne’s personality to be refracted and revealed through their interactions. Batman consequentially grew in complexity and purpose, and his solitary vigil, ironically, was granted dimension by being shared.

Sure Batman is badass, and sure, some of the heroes he peripherally inspires simply want to ride alongside the smart guy in the sweet car with the nifty gadgets, but the true faithfuls, the ones who not only fight with him, but invest enough in his mission to emblazon themselves with his insignias – the Robins, the Batgirls, the Batwomans, the Nightwings (okay there’s only one of him) – those who, in the case of Dick Grayson and John Blake, are even willing to literally take on his mantle if need be; these figures are drawn to the man behind the mask, which informs and deepens the sacrificial poetry of his purpose. And so, even in Frank Miller’s cynical vision, when the aged Bruce Wayne is walled up in his mansion like a psychotic Howard Hughes, we still see him travelling with the flash of bright colour that is the new Robin, her vibrancy and hopefulness still invading his world to offer a stark relief to his plight.

Even more than the contrast that such a character evokes, Kane foresaw that Robin would provide a compelling imaginative invitation for readers, a window through which the audience could project themselves into the Batman legend:

‘young boys reading about Batman’s exploits would project their own images into the story and daydream about fighting alongside the caped crusader as junior Batmen. I thought that every young boy would want to be like Robin’ (p.46)

We were able to ride along with this tortured icon, to aid him in his fight, even if we could not truly share his pain.

Again and again it appears that Batman presents a flame to which his cadre of vigilante moths (and the audience that they embody) are inexorably drawn – inspired by his mission statement, no doubt, but ultimately stirred by the man himself, by his tenacity and purpose. Whenever people get near Bruce Wayne they see a man so broken, so torn up with grief that his only means of profitably controlling that emotional maelstrom is to funnel it into an ultimately self-destructive altruism. They, and we, feel compelled to help him, to try and save him just as he longs to save others. But he’s certainly not going to see a psychiatrist, and his moral code is so engrained that any chance of taking solace in a healthier ‘normal life’ seems to him to be a betrayal of his social responsibility. So instead – ultimately buying into the beneficial role that he serves – we join him in scampering across rooftops and helping kick bad guys in the face, resigning ourselves to an abstracted hope: if we can’t beat those personal demons, we’ll just facilitate smacking around some physical ones and hope that the metaphor eventually sinks in…

And so, this recent killing of Robin operates on a curiously self-reflexive and disturbingly experiential manner: the narrative itself is grieving the absence of the audience’s own invested point of view, both their unique perspective upon the depicted events and the sounding board that they would usually provide to the experience.

Both literally and metatextually, in the aftermath of this killing, Batman is left with no one to talk to – a fundamental dialogue between reader and text egregiously fractured. Thus Bruce Wayne is left wordless, fighting through a silent void in the wake of his loss.

IMAGE: Batman and Robin #18, by Patrick Gleason

* I apologise that I do not know the finer details of the ongoing story arc, but I am reliably informed that he was killed by an adult, cloned version of himself (?!) Man, comic books love them some surreal dramatic irony…

** And there is a tragic foreshadowing, perhaps, in Damian’s decision to steal Jason Todd’s costume to beginfighting crime against his father’s initial wishes.

*** Even Bat-Mite pops in from time to time to spread anarchy in his sycophantic emulation of the Dark Knight.